by Brock Clarke
And then I noticed my aunt, scanning the church, from one side to the other, pew to nave, her head on a swivel. I wondered if she was looking for the Sociologist, or for whomever else was looking for the Sociologist. I wondered if she felt a presence, too.
161.
It was a Tuesday. Midafternoon. There was no service. But the church was crowded. Loud with murmurs. People in groups, milling around. Single people, sitting in the pews. Three women next to me, looking at the arched ceiling. They were Italian. I knew this not because they were speaking Italian, but because they were holding copies of the Italian-language edition of my mother’s famous book.
162.
My mother’s famous book was published in twenty-seven languages. In forty-three countries. Many of those countries were majority Protestant. But some were Roman Catholic, and some were Orthodox. Some were Hindu. Buddhist. Muslim. Animist. Some were nothing. Some didn’t know what they were. The book had been on the hardcover best-seller lists in thirty of those countries, and then, after two years of being in hardcover, it was finally published in paperback and then it was a best seller in thirty-five countries. It became more than a book in many of those places. In Israel it was made into a radio program, aired once a week; one week a chapter was read in Hebrew by an ultra-Orthodox settler and then the next week in Arabic by a Palestinian. In Argentina it was made into a stage play, a musical, in which my mother, a Calvinist Eva Perón, sang her praise songs to John Calvin from a balcony. And a small filmmaking studio in Finland had made the book into a movie, a movie in which my mother was a character, and I was a character, and John Calvin was a character, a character whom my mother and I are looking for and whom we find living near the Arctic Circle with the Sámi. John Calvin was bearded down to the sternum and up to just below his eyes. This bearded John Calvin is wearing a tracksuit under his parka, and in the final frame the three of us—me, my mother, John Calvin—are seen from the back, riding north through the snowy woods on our snowmobiles.
163.
And why was my mother’s famous book so famous? I don’t think it was that her readers cared so much about John Calvin or believed in his ideas. I think that they cared that my mother cared; they believed because she believed. They could tell, no matter what language the book was in, how truly my mother believed in John Calvin. They wanted to believe in something the way my mother believed in John Calvin. It wasn’t necessarily that they wanted to believe in what she believed. They wanted to believe how she believed.
164.
It wasn’t just the three Italian women: nearly every person in that church, dozens and dozens of them, was holding a copy of my mother’s famous book.
“Do you know what else your mother was afraid of?” my aunt asked me. We were standing toward the back of the church. The Reverend John Lawrence had wandered to the front, and for a moment I’d lost him in the crowd of my mother’s fans.
“What?”
“The religious crazies,” she said in her normal voice, which echoed and bounced around the church. A few people turned and looked at us. Their expressions were hostile, deranged even, and I thought I understood what my aunt meant.
“She was afraid that the religious crazies might hurt her?”
“She was afraid,” my aunt said, “that people might think she was one of them.”
165.
A few moments later my aunt said, “You’ll be wanting to know how I betrayed the Sociologist.” This seemed to come out of nowhere and to be out of context, but by now I’d learned that the only context that mattered when it came to my aunt’s stories was that she told them when she felt like it was time to tell them. She spoke loudly, as though she didn’t care who heard. And in fact, the religious crazies didn’t seem to care about what she was saying. They ignored us, fixated as they were on John Calvin’s church and on their copies of my mother’s famous book, not understanding, I suppose, that their hero, my mother, was in my aunt’s story, too. “It was 1979. Your mother came to visit the Sociologist and me. This was eleven years after our estrangement.”
I didn’t even bother asking her where this had happened. I figured I’d eventually learn. I said, instead, for the sake of clarity, “By ‘eleven years after our estrangement,’ you really mean, eleven years after you had sex with my father and my mother said she never wanted to see you again.” For this was one of the lessons I’d learned from my aunt: you have an obligation to be clear, especially when it comes to other people’s crimes.
But Aunt Beatrice didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. “The Sociologist,” she continued, “was by now mostly smuggling weapons. Real weapons, not decorative ones. Guns, not knives. Occasionally, he smuggled into the country the people to whom he then sold the smuggled weapons. More occasionally, he smuggled out of the country the political leaders who had been overthrown by the people whom he’d smuggled into the country and to whom he’d sold the smuggled weapons. It was a happy time for both of us. For all of us, I should say. Zhow was of course with us. He was already quite interested in animals, although I assumed his interest was more zoological than carnal. Connie was there, too. She and I were already anticipating our future. In it, we would no longer be smuggling or stealing objects. Those are not crimes for old people, Calvin. Technology is not a weapon. Technology is a crutch. We knew we couldn’t steal antiquities forever. Old things are heavy things. But information, we could steal and sell. The Sociologist was there to sell weapons. But Connie and I were there to work on the technology. As long as we had the technology, we could be in wheelchairs and still steal and sell what people wanted most.”
“And fifteen years later you were slapping women in Ohio,” I reminded her. I did this not out of cruelty but because at that moment she looked and sounded old and tired, and I wanted to remind her that she was not done then so that she would believe she was not done now either.
“There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God,” my aunt quoted, which was the quote that my mother had used to defend my blogging from the disapproval of the Reverend John Lawrence. “I was so happy when I heard from your mother and that she said she wanted to see me. I’d missed her, Calvin. You may be surprised to hear that, but it’s true. I said earlier that Connie was my best friend. That was fine. But I would have given up my best friend in exchange for my sister. I wanted her back in my life again. I wanted her to meet the Sociologist. I wanted her to visit us. Although of course I also wanted to know why she wanted to visit us. I was afraid she’d want an apology. And as you know, I couldn’t give her that. But no, at first all it seemed she wanted was to walk on the beach and talk about Congress. Her church. The house. ‘The house of horrors.’ She was terrified of you, Calvin. She admitted that to me. She didn’t understand you. She said you didn’t seem to care about John Calvin, or anything, and I said that you sounded wonderful! Your mother laughed at that. She did! I was so glad she was back in my life, Calvin.”
My aunt paused. I now recognize the pause. It was the pause you take before you remember some pain you felt, some pain you caused.
“And I was glad that she liked the Sociologist. And that he liked her. They had a lot in common. They were very compatible.”
It pained me to hear Aunt Beatrice speak so euphemistically, and so I said, “They had sex,” and my aunt nodded.
“I was actually proud of your mother, Calvin. Because she had done it to hurt me. That was her intention. I drove her to the airport, walked her to the gate, and right as she was about to board the plane back to Boston, she told me what she and the Sociologist had done, days earlier, while Connie and I were working. I didn’t have to ask her why, but she told me anyway: ‘I wanted to hurt you,’ she said. And then she walked down the gangway and I never saw her again. I admired everything about that. But the Sociologist, Morten, was different. Because he had known it would hurt me, and he did not want to hurt me, but he went ahead and did it anyway.” I didn’t bother to point out to my aunt that she knew that having s
ex with my father would hurt my mother, and that presumably she had not wanted to hurt my mother, but she’d done it anyway. As John Calvin once said, “When the same qualities which we admire in ourselves are seen in others, even though they be superior . . . we maliciously lower and carp at them.”
“I called Interpol,” my aunt continued. “I called the CIA, I called everyone I could think of, and told them who the Sociologist was, and what he had done, and where they could find him, and then Connie punched me in the face, for betraying her brother, and for ruining our business, and then the Sociologist went on the run, and I told Zhow his father was dead, which was exactly how I felt about him, and so not exactly a lie, and then Zhow and I moved to Ohio, and then when Zhow was eighteen I told him that I’d betrayed his father and that it was possible he wasn’t dead, and then Zhow left me, and then . . .” My aunt didn’t finish the sentence; it just sort of trailed off, and I tried to follow it, in my head, as it led from Ohio, briefly back to Congress, and then Stockholm, and then Copenhagen, and then Paris, and now here.
“I’m sorry, Calvin,” my aunt said.
“It’s all right,” I said. Because I assumed my aunt was apologizing for telling me something about my mother that I didn’t want to know. But she needn’t have apologized for that. Didn’t she realize that the more I learned about my mother’s sins, the more I loved her?
Although of course my aunt realized that. And anyway, that’s not what she was apologizing for.
My aunt regarded me for a moment. She looked piratical, with her missing tooth and her hair swept over one eye, and her silver ship necklace humming in the soft church light. Then she grabbed my upper arms. It was as close as she’d ever come to hugging me. I felt like something was about to be revealed to me. My aunt’s lips were pursed, her skin furrowed and creased, all lines leading toward her mouth. Tell me, I wanted to say, and I might have actually said it, because my aunt nodded ruefully as though to indicate that I had asked for it, and girlishly, Americanly, loudly, in a voice no one in the church could have missed, she said, “Oh my Gawd! You’re Nola Bledsoe’s son!”
166.
John Calvin said, “The pastor ought to have two voices: one, for gathering the sheep; and another, for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves.”
I tried both voices. When I was surrounded (and I was surrounded immediately, from all sides, by my mother’s fans, her acolytes; they were five deep around me, and some of them were hyperventilating, and their breathlessness became my breathlessness), I said, “Yes, I am Calvin Bledsoe.” I said this calmly, soothingly, but it did not calm them. It did not soothe them. The gang pressed even closer to me. Many of them had their copies of my mother’s famous book in their hands, waving the books over their heads. And I said, somewhat less calmly, that there was no need to push, that it was wonderful to meet them, so good of them to come, what a great surprise, what a beautiful church, so good to see so many people with their copies of my mother’s famous book, would anyone like me to sign their copy, I’d be happy to sign their copy, I just needed some space, and a pen, could everyone give me some space, and does anyone have a pen?
I had no idea what I was saying, obviously. I was scared, obviously. And in any case, they weren’t listening. I wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted my mother. I knew how they felt; at that moment, I wanted my mother, too.
I wasn’t what they wanted, but they pushed closer anyway. Their bodies oppressed me. So did their mouths, and the many languages I didn’t understand coming out of them. I reached for my phone, so I could translate them. I didn’t know what else to do. But there was no room for me to even reach for my phone. The crowd was that close. And I hated them. And I wondered if my mother had ever hated them, too—hated them even though she had made them. Or especially since she had made them.
“Go away!” I screamed, in a voice even louder and more girlish than my aunt’s had been. “My mother’s dead! You didn’t know her! I didn’t know her! She didn’t know John Calvin! She was the Conductor! She was pulverized by a train! She’s gone! What else do you want! You already have her famous book! There’s nothing more of her to have!”
This, as John Calvin had recommended, was the voice to ward away the wolves. It worked, for a moment. The people backed up respectfully, as one does when faced with a crazy person. When they did, I could finally see over the top of them. I’d lost my aunt after she’d said what she’d said, but now I spotted her. She was at the front of the church, talking with the Reverend John Lawrence, who was sitting in John Calvin’s chair. I knew it was John Calvin’s chair because there was a green sign next to it that read chaise de calvin. The chair was made of wood, dark wood, although I couldn’t see much more of the chair because, of course, the Reverend John Lawrence was sitting in it. No, he wasn’t sitting in it; he was one with it. His back was against its back; his arms were over its arms. My aunt didn’t seem happy about it. Her back was to me, and I couldn’t see her face, but she was waving her arms, gesturing toward the Reverend John Lawrence, the chair, the church, him, the chair. This didn’t seem to affect him much, though. The Reverend John Lawrence just sat there, with this beatific look on his face, as though preparing to be transported. Or already in the process of being transported. His eyes were far away, and I knew he was seeing the person he wanted to see—my mother—at the end of his journey. My aunt put her right hand on the back of the chair and seemed to try to pull it, tug it, wobble it, but that had no effect on the Reverend John Lawrence, although it had an effect on me. Because I remembered one of the commandments—“Thou shall steal while thy partner distracts”—and realized why she’d announced my presence: I was the distraction she’d created so that she could then steal John Calvin’s chair.
167.
The crowd soon recovered. It began to advance on me again. And it was my fear of them, more than anything—more than wanting to help out my aunt, more than wanting to hurt the Reverend John Lawrence (although I did want to hurt him)—that caused me to do what I did next.
“Hey!” I shouted. That word sounded so American, so out of place in that Swiss house of God, which was also the house of John Calvin. “Who does that guy think he is, sitting in John Calvin’s chair?”
168.
I won’t describe what happened next, except to say that it was swift and brutal, and that the Reverend John Lawrence was wounded during it, and that while it was his fault that he’d sat in John Calvin’s chair, it was my fault that he was hurt being removed from it. It was the first time something I’d said had caused someone to be physically hurt, although it wouldn’t be the last time, or the worst wounding.
And then he was gone. The crowd had taken him away, to somewhere else in the church. I could hear them shouting. Their voices sounded like pitchforks. My aunt was gone, too. Meanwhile, there was John Calvin’s chair, tipped over. I righted it. Admired it. Swept the church with my eyes to make sure that no one was around. And there wasn’t. Because I’d done it! I’d created the distraction that would allow me to steal the chair! And so I stole it.
Thirteen
169.
My aunt was waiting for me outside St. Peter’s. As she’d promised, the station wagon hadn’t been ticketed or towed. She was in the driver’s seat. The station wagon’s long back door was swung way open. And it occurred to me that my aunt didn’t just steal old vehicles. She stole old vehicles with large cargo areas, perfect for stowing large stolen objects. I stuffed John Calvin’s chair into the wayback, slammed the door, and got into the station wagon, and then we drove off.
170.
I’d expected Aunt Beatrice to be happy that I’d stolen John Calvin’s chair for her, but no.
“That was unnecessary,” she said, and her voice was flat—as flat as the Reverend John Lawrence’s. I wondered where he was at that moment. If there were a cell or a torture chamber or a morgue in St. Peter’s, it would not have surprised me if he were in it.
“What was?”
“Why did y
ou steal the chair?” my aunt asked, and her voice wasn’t flat anymore. I could hear the puzzled hurt in it.
“Didn’t you want it stolen?” I asked, and my aunt frowned.
“No, Calvin,” she said. “I didn’t want it stolen.”
My aunt didn’t say more. She just sat at the wheel, fuming. For the first time, I fully understood that verb. It was though her anger was a gas, and I could smell the fumes. How had I so badly misread her intentions? I went back in time to picture the scene. There was the Reverend John Lawrence in John Calvin’s chair. There was Aunt Beatrice, standing over him, berating him, pleading with him. What had she wanted, if she hadn’t wanted him to get out of the chair so she could steal it? Whatever she wanted, he wasn’t moving. I could see him clearly. He wasn’t moving, no matter what my aunt said or did. That chair had given him power. My aunt, I pictured her, in the church: she looked hunched over, ancient, diminished. Like a supplicant who’d failed to move the powerful man in the chair she’d wanted to steal. And then I had moved him, or had had him moved. And then I’d stolen it. And that was why she was so disturbed.
“You wanted to steal the chair yourself,” I guessed.
My aunt in the past had said, “Very good, Calvin,” when I’d made a good guess about something about her past or our present. But this time, fuming, she said nothing.